Fashion's untamed wild side: whether in the form of pelts, plumes, prints, or animal symbolism, faunal apparel long has represented one of man's more primal instincts.

• Position: Museums Today - Exhibition at Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York

"WILD: Fashion Untamed" presents a historical and crosscultural examination of mankind's obsession with animalism as expressed through clothing. With more than 100 costumes and accessories on display, the exhibition focuses on the practical, spiritual, psychosexual, and socioeconomic underpinnings of the decorative possibilities of birds and beasts.

Organized thematically, "Fashion Untamed" examines how the physical and sexual characteristics of animals have come to define ideals of femininity. Evoking the power and strength of wild beasts, the notion of "Woman as Huntress" is explored in the work of fashion designers such as Jean Paul Gaultier and Yohji Yamamoto. Drawing on 19th-century representations of "La Belle Sauvage," these designers have used animal skins, crudely sewn together and molded to the body to construct images of 21st-century Amazons invested with a potent feminism.

Since prehistoric times, fur has been employed not only for warmth and protection, but for display and adornment. Its decorative possibilities were realized fully in the Middle Ages with the emergence of a symbolic system for determining social rank and class affiliation based on its material value. During the Renaissance, the necks, cuffs, and hems of gowns trimmed with ermine, lettice, or miniver (all members of the weasel family) became hallmarks of fashionable aristocrats. Today, fur continues to announce wealth, luxury, and exclusivity. The works of Fendi, Guccio Gucci, and Christian Dior illuminate contemporary representations of the fur-clad "Bourgeois Woman."

Fake furs also are featured as a means of manufacturing class access and for constructing definitions of the "Ethical Woman." Recent debates over fur and social morality are analyzed through the advertising campaigns of the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and (the now disbanded) LYNX of the United Kingdom.

In the visual history of fashions for men, artists such as Hans Holbein, Tiziano Vecellio (aka Titian), Peter Paul Rubens, and Raphaello Sanzio (aka Raphael) are conspicuous for their highly refined and naturalistic representations of the different varieties of furs included in the costume of the nobility in the Renaissance. These painters manifest fur's aesthetic and economic values by equating it with the wealth and power of the aristocracy. In the early 20th century, the fur coat became the hallmark of the "mogul" or "capitalist," a stereotype of the fur-clad man that has...